Welcome to the Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS) special
issue organized by the Immersive Learning Research Network (iLRN)
following the 2017 iLRN conference. This issue includes eight papers
on the focused topic "Immersive Learning Research", including extended
versions of papers presented at iLRN 2017 and articles from the public
call for papers.

We are grateful for all reviewers and authors who took part in the
creation of this special issue. Your important support and work is
what gave this special issue rigor and quality. Also, special thanks
to Filipe Penicheiro, our editorial assistant for the issue and
co-author of this foreword, who spent countless hours formatting
submissions and communicating with authors. And we would also like to
thank the members of the J.UCS consortium which allows J. UCS to
continue to be an open content journal.

This special issue displays the multicultural strength of iLRN,
featuring authors from Brazil, Chile, Finland, Germany, Netherlands,
Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, United Kingdom, and the United States of
America. It also features eight papers on a topic that we know best -
creation and evaluation of effective immersive learning experiences by
diverse researchers across interdisciplinary contexts.

The paper "The Sense of Presence Exploration in Virtual Reality
Therapy" by Max M. North and Sarah M. North explores the sense of
presence that participants experience in Virtual Reality Therapy
experiments. In this article, sense of presence is briefly defined,
followed by a discussion of factors effecting sense of presence,
continuing with methods to measure sense of presence and assertions
concerning virtual presence, and finally, conclusions and discussions
are presented.

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The paper "Do you Want to be a Superhero? Boosting Emotional States
with the Booth" by Jan Schneider, Dirk Börner, Peter Van Rosmalen, and
Marcus Specht presents and evaluates The Booth, an application
designed to get learners into a powerful and resourceful emotional
state. Evaluation includes a two-step user study, showing that use of
the Booth induced a positive emotional state on users, and that using
the Booth helps learners emotionally prepare for public speaking.

The paper "Development of a Software that Supports Multimodal Learning
Analytics: A Case Study on Oral Presentations" by Robert Munoz,
Rodolfo Villarroel, Thiago S. Barcelos, Alexandra Souza, Erik Merino,
Rodolfo Guiñez, and Leandro A. Silva reports on the development of a
tool to measure the development of complex skills in real classroom
environments that is flexible enough to add and process data from
different sensors. The evaluation showed promise in use as a feedback
tool for teachers during student oral presentations.

The paper "Mixed Agents Virtual Observation Lenses for Immersive
Learning Environments" by Samah Felemban, Michael Gardner, Victor
Callahan, and Anasol Peña-Rios developed a virtual observation model
for mapping classroom observations to how people can be evaluated in
virtual 3D environments. Their work holds promise for demonstrating
the learning affordances inherent in 3D virtual world environments.

It is our hope that this special issue on immersive learning research
will aid scholars and practitioners in advancing the important work of
defining across these interdisciplinary contexts the properties,
contexts, conditions, procedures, states, measures, and outcomes that
converge to reliably create an effective immersive learning experience
for learners. We also invite readers to check out the proceedings of
prior and future iLRN conferences at https://immersivelrn.org/, and
get to know this exciting interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary
research community.